My anti-blacklist letter to NATFHE

For what it's worth, I just e-mailed the letter below to the officers of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE). I attached copies for the officers of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which is due to merge with NATFHE in a unified British faculty association.

=> I hope that those of you who oppose the idea of academic blacklists will also write letters to NATFHE making your concerns known. This is important! (I know that some of you receiving this have already written letters to NATFHE opposing this blacklist proposal, and I commend you for it.)

To: Officers and Members of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE)

I am dismayed to learn that a proposal has been made for NATFHE to endorse a blacklist of Israeli academics. Like the measures briefly adopted by the AUT in 2005, the proposed NATFHE Resolution 198C is misleadingly framed as a call for a "boycott" of Israeli scholars, but I am afraid that the honest term with which to describe a practice of this sort is an academic blacklist. The explicit political test it would entail makes it a direct and unambiguous assault on the most fundamental principles of academic freedom.

This widespread condemnation was both appropriate and heartening, because the issues at stake are not restricted to Britain and Israel. An assault on the central principles of academic freedom is a threat to all of us. And for academics themselves to endorse the blacklisting of other academics is especially dangerous and reprehensible. If we make it clear that we don't take the idea of academic freedom seriously, why should we expect anyone else to take it seriously?

Now this pernicious and indefensible proposal has been resurrected by some members of NATFHE--in a form that is, remarkably enough, even more offensive and dangerous than last year's AUT resolutions. I hope you will reject it decisively and unambiguously.

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About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and is currently a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)